The next issue of World Revolution … under the next UK government

In World Revolution
333 we said the
most important thing about the 2010 elections. "This time the
big issue is not who will win, not even how many people will bother to vote,
but how to reduce the deficit over the next few years - how to make the working
class pay by cutting jobs, pay and services."

The material situation facing British capitalism is hardly
up for debate. All the main parties, despite their efforts, cannot hide the
reality of the economic crisis and admit that the next government's cuts will
be tougher and deeper than Thatcher's in the 1980s. The little parties - both
left and right - who say that capitalism can be run for the benefit of the
majority of the population are liars, fantasists, or, mostly, both.

Yet, while the state of the economy is a known quantity, and
the austere implications for the working class under a new government are
devastating, the political carnival is not obviously leading toward a
particular result. The TV debates, the talk of a hung parliament, the emergence
of the Liberal Democrats, the fluctuating polls - these are all calculated to
draw people into the electoral game, to convince us that our vote could count.

The economic reality we know. What has not yet been revealed
is the new shape of the political apparatus of the British ruling class.

Each issue of WR
is produced at the beginning of the month. For us to do this at the start of
May would be redundant. Everything in WR
333 remains valid up until the election, and after it we want to rapidly
analyse what the changes in the political scene say about the line-up of the
bourgeoisie. This is not because we are passive consumers of the parliamentary
pantomime, but because the British bourgeoisie, at the political level, is one
of the most important in the world, and revolutionaries have a responsibility
to put forward their understanding of the manoeuvres and conflicts within the
capitalist class, the dominant class in modern society.

So, we can tell all our readers and subscribers that WR 334 will be produced in mid-May, and,
following on that, WRs 335 and 336 in
the middle of June and July respectively. Of course, each issue will continue
to be concerned with the whole range of issues facing the working class: the
class struggle, the economic crisis, imperialist conflict, the internationalist
milieu - as well as the particular spasm of the bourgeoisie we are seeing in
this episode of the democratic soap opera.